Standardized Testing and the Spanish-Speaking Minorities: Looking Beyond the Correlations.

Horn, Thomas D.; Hernandez, Carmela

This paper contains a critical evaluation of the research conducted by O.L. Davis and Carl Personke on the use of reading readiness tests in English and Spanish for Spanish speaking elementary school pupils. Davis and Personke indicated that, when Spanish speaking first graders were tested in both English and Spanish, most of the differences were not significant. The authors of this critique argue that Davis and Personke misinterpreted their data and that the result has been a continued misuse of standardized tests for Spanish speaking pupils. One of the objections was that insufficient attention was given to language dominance factors and to the identification of pupil characteristics other than language. Another problem was that the nature of the population distributions contributing to the correlations between predictor and criterion measures had not been carefully analyzed. (MKM)